This is VISUP, dedicated to exploring the vast Fortean realms of mind control, deep politics, sacred geometry, onomatology and synchronicity; occult film and music; the supernatural, the extraterrestrial and the multi-dimensional; high weirdness in all its many forms

Friday, July 24, 2015

On July 20, 2012, James Eagan Holmes entered a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and opened fired during a midnight showing of the then-current Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. This event unfolded approximately three days before what has been widely cited as the beginning of a period the ancient world referred to as the "Dog Days of Summer." Of the date, Fortean philosopher Robert Anton Wilson noted: "Celebrations of the Dog Star, Sirius, beginning on July 23, are the origin of the expression 'dog days,' meaning the days from July 23 to September 8, when the last rituals to Sirius were performed" (Cosmic Trigger Volume I, pg. 87).

This period gained reputation for its intensity in the ancient world:

"... Throughout Latin literature there are many references to 'the Dog Days' which followed the helical rising of Sirius in the summer. These hot, parched days were thought by that time to derive some of the ferocity and dryness from the 'searing' of Sirius. Traditions arose of Sirius being red because it was in fact red at its helical rising, just as any other body at the horizon is red. When marking rhetorical allusions to the Dog Days, the Latins would often speak of Sirius being red at that time, which it was."

(The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, pg. 86)

The extreme heat often associated with the helical rising of Sirius was frequently blamed for the chaos that had a way of unfolding during this period. Certainly the notorious Aurora shooting would have been viewed as an apt event for this time frame in the ancient world.

The Aurora shooting was followed just a little over two weeks later by the Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. This shooting spree was carried out by Wade Michael Page, a former military man and white nationalist whose victims included the father of Sirius filmmaker Armardeep Kaleka.

While Aurora shooter James Eagan Holmes didn't have such an extreme background, his stock piling of firearms and obsession with Heath Ledger's Joker (a meme of which became closely associated with the Patriot movement via Alex Jones, as I noted before here) indicate that he had some familiarity with Patriot ideology. Page certainly did and this underlining factor was addressed before by this researcher here.

Alex Jones in Joker makeup

Let us now return to the present. On July 23, 2015 (the actual start date for the Dog Days of Summer in many accounts), a 58 year old "drifter" known as John Russell Houser entered a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, and opened fired during a showing of the film Trainwreck at roughly 7:30 PM. This shooting unfolded just a little over a month after the Charleston church shooting, an assault carried out by a would-be white nationalist known as Dylann Roof. This shooting unfolded on June 17, 2015. The numbers 17 and 23 have much esoteric significance and have been closely linked together by Robert Anton Wilson, who dubbed their pairing "the 23/17 phenomenon." The great Tek-Gnostic gave a great rundown of this curiosity before here:

"The 23/17 enigma, simply stated, refers to the belief that many incidents of synchronicity are directly connected to the numbers 23… 17… or some combination or modification of these numbers. Uncle Bob Wilson (aka: Robert Anton Wilson) credits William S. Burroughs as being the first person to identify the 23 enigma. Wilson, in his book The Cosmic Trigger, related the following story:

" 'More important to our narrative, William S. Burroughs (author of ‘Naked Lunch’) introduced me to the 23 Enigma while I was at Playboy... In the early '60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that he'd been running the ferry 23 years without an accident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody aboard. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23... Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. To his astonishment, 23s appeared in a lot of them.'

"Burroughs wrote a short story in 1967 called '23 Skidoo.' The term '23 skidoo' was popularized in the early 1920s and means 'it's time to leave while the getting is good.' This expression appeared in newspapers as early as 1906.

"Wilson, along with co-author Robert Shea of “Illuminatus!” fame, more clearly identifies the 23/17 phenomenon, in that both numbers are tied to the Discordian Law of Fives. The Discordian holybook, the Principia Discordia states that: All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5. To Discordians, 23, a corollary of the law of fives, is considered either lucky, unlucky, sacred to their goddess Eris, sinister, sacred to the unholy gods of the Cthulhu Mythos, or significantly strange.

"In Illuminatus!, the character Simon Moon illustrates this rational using the following mathematical-numerological-magical formula… in 23: 2 + 3 = 5, and in 17: 1 + 7 = 8 = 2³ ...clear as mud, right? To clarify, Moon pulls in another enigmatic number… 40. In the following excerpt from Illuminatus!, Moon further clarifies…

"'More interestingly, without invoking the mystic 5, we still arrive at 40 by adding 17 + 23. What, then, is the significance of 40? I've run through various associations… Jesus had his 40 days in the desert, Ali Baba had his 40 thieves, Buddhists have their 40 meditations, the solar system is almost exactly 40 astronomical units in radius (Pluto yo-yos a bit)—but I have no definite theory… yet.'"

I've already dealt with the appearance of 17 (and also 23) in the Charleston church shooting before here and the deep political implications of it here.

Needless to say, the overlap between the 2012 and 2015 shootings noted above is curious. The similarities between the Sikh temple and Charleston church shootings are especially striking: In both cases white nationalists shot up holy places associated with minorities. And of course, the same applies to the location of the Holmes and Houser shooting sprees: a theater.

What's more, early reports indicate the Houser was himself interested in white nationalist and Patriot ideology. Raw Storyreports:

"Houser signed up for an account with Tea Party Nation in June 2013, but he was not an active commenter.

"Posts on other forums reveal Houser’s belief that the U.S. was racist against white people, sterilization should be mandatory for welfare recipients and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was a more historically significant figure than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

" 'Hitler accomplished far more than any other through "pragmatically forming,” ' Houser posted in January 2015.

"He wrote something of a manifesto in March 2013, when he asked for help channeling his anger and frustration as a white Christian man living under President Barack Obama...

"Houser argued in a January 2014 forum post that the United States needed a right-wing party like Greece’s neo-Nazi 'Golden Dawn' faction to restore its greatness..."